This year’s Nobel physics prize, awarded to
Peter Higgs
and
Francois Englert
, discoverers of the Higgs boson, is a special award. It closes the loop on 100 years of physics that has utterly transformed today’s world.

The story goes like this. In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr made the first real shot at describing what goes on inside an atom, positing that electrons circled an atomic nucleus and that a mysterious new way of describing energy – quantum mechanics – governed the way physics worked on the atomic scale.

Look where it led. After the interregnum of World War I, atomic physics entered a golden age as young thinkers made bold conjectures and invented new mathematical descriptions for a mysterious physics in which particles could not be pinned down to a location and energy came in quantised chunks.

Erwin Schrodinger, best remembered for a mythical cat; Werner Heisenberg, one of the few who stayed in Nazi Germany and who was accused of Nazi sympathies; Max Born, grandfather of Olivia Newton-John; and Paul Dirac, the shy, retiring, probably autistic Englishman; were among the most prominent.

Dirac predicted the existence of anti-matter when his equations suggested there was a positively charged particle identical to the electron (now called the positron). He was once asked what practical application his discoveries had. None whatever, he confidently replied.

Practical applications abound

Dirac couldn’t have been more wrong. Ever heard of positron emission tomography, now a commonly used method for medical scanning?

And aside from that small thing, quantum mechanics led to transistors, integrated circuits and lasers. In fact, anything electronic that we use today is based in the most fundamental way on these discoveries.

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When Hitler came to power, and later invaded most of Europe, many of the founders of quantum mechanics had to flee, mainly to the United States. And that gave America an inestimable advantage in building the research and teaching infrastructure in its universities that made it the undisputed world leader in discovery and innovation.

Quantum mechanics also led directly to nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

The horrifying alternate history is that Hitler could have been first to the atomic bomb had he not derided “Jewish physics" and driven most of its practitioners into exile.

New discoveries took a break during World War II when most of the Allies’ physicists were busy developing radar or the bomb.

But a problem remained: how to introduce Einstein’s theory of relativity into quantum theory. New Yorker Richard Feynman, an ebullient and complex character, who worked at Los Alamos on the first atomic bombs, was one of those who solved that problem after the war, bringing theory back into line with what was being observed experimentally.

Feynman and his peers sorted out quantum mechanics as it applies to the electromagnetic force and the theory is called quantum electrodynamics. But other forces were also observed at the sub-atomic level: a force which held the atomic nucleus together called the “strong force" and another responsible for radioactivity called the “weak force".

American physicist Murray Gell-Mann solved the strong force problem in the 1960s with his theory of quarks, small particles which joined together to make up the protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei. Quarks have “charge" but unlike electrical charge which comes in two types – positive and negative – quarks have three which are named red, green and blue. In a lame physicists’ joke, the theory is called quantum chromodynamics.

May the forces be with you

Then in the early 1970s Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg succeeded in showing how electromagnetic forces and the weak forces were two sides of the same coin. In the very, very early universe they were one force but, as the universe expanded they soon flopped out of each other into separate forces.

This structure of physics, finalised in the 1970s, became known as the “standard model". So where does the Higgs boson, awarded the 2013 Nobel prize, fit it? The particle, and its associated field, were postulated as a mechanism to account for the fact that some particles had mass and others didn’t. That’s how the Higgs particle closes the loop. It fills in the missing piece in the standard model.

So that’s the story of the century. One hundred years ago we started to pick apart atoms. Now we have a model which explains all the known evidence in particle physics which, along the way, led to the invention of electronics and changed the world.

But is that really all there is? Probably not. It’s postulated that right after the big bang that started the universe, all forces were one, including the strong force and including gravity which, being very weak force, does not figure in quantum mechanics. As the universe expanded they flopped out one by one into the separate forces we see today.

Can we account for how this happened? For the last 25 years theoretical physicists have tried to explain it and the leading candidate, “string theory", has led them down a rabbit hole from which they are still to emerge.

Meanwhile more weird things are afoot. Most of the universe’s mass seems to be dark matter and dark energy, something for which the standard model has no explanation.

Sounds like it’s time for some more blue sky thinking, to untether just a part of the higher education research budget from practical outcomes and let some really smart people loose. Who knows where it will lead?